


Anisotropy

by otterie



Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types, The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon - Book & Movie Combination, Canon Divergent, Enemies to Lovers, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempt, Implied/Referenced Torture, Imprisonment, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Newt is a WCKD Guard, Psychological Torture, References to Depression, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:40:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21812311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/otterie/pseuds/otterie
Summary: The streets look to be carved of amber and steel, deserted as they are after curfew. That they're eerily empty adds to that too-polished, crystalline feeling.Newt wonders if the architects knew it'd look like this when they were building it. Like it was the last precious thing in the world, too clean to be truly lived in, serene and sterile.(Or, how The Death Cure might have looked if Newt was a WCKD guard.)
Relationships: Minho/Newt (Maze Runner)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 18
Collections: Maze Runner Secret Santa 2019





	1. Expectation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [whiterubys](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiterubys/gifts).



**an·i·so·trop·ic**

_(of an object or substance) having a physical property which has a different value when measured in different directions. An example is wood, which is stronger along the grain than across it._

_(also a type of distortion or flaw in treated glass, which causes iridescence.)_

* * *

In the hours of the night shift, the shining surfaces of lab tables and screens reflect the synthetic oranges and deep blues from outside. Glowing billboards across the street from WCKD turn the windows to stained glass, and on the rare nights when rain falls here, the city catches the light like it's made of jewels. Silver trains snake quickly along their rails until they slow in the small hours and rest. The streets look to be carved of amber and steel, deserted as they are after curfew. That they're eerily empty adds to that too-polished, crystalline feeling.

Newt wonders if the architects knew it'd look like this when they were building it. Like it was the last precious thing in the world, too clean to be truly lived in, serene and sterile. 

He's aware that he shouldn't be allowed to find it creepy. He has no right to take it for granted, no right at all. There are dens of Cranks and people half-crazed on the Bliss outside the walls, and yet he's creeped out by this place? All this safety, and security, and clean water—it somehow isn't enough for him to find peace in it? 

But then, maybe that's always been part of his problem. He's probably a bastard for thinking it, but it really isn't enough, not with the price they've put on it. Not to him.

Anyway, he's adapted. The brighter it gets outside, the closer he gets to sleep, until dawn sees him crashing into bed back in his room in the barracks. As the sun rides out the last of its arc and begins to dip in the afternoon, he's waking up again, splashing his face with water, and returning to work before twilight fully falls. 

He's getting used to being on the wrong side of everything. But it's still definitely doing some not-quite-alright things to his thoughts. He’s been even shorter with his fellow guards than usual. And he's basically just winging it today, having chosen to get some (choppy) rest, rather than obsessing over his notes and plans. It was probably a wiser decision. More can be gained by getting a tiny bit closer to being genuinely alert, than by thinking he’s got every detail figured out.

He rubs his eyes on the back of a gloved hand when he arrives back at headquarters, still bleary from finishing his shift at 0600 and not able to fill in enough sleep between then and now (which is shortly after everyone else’s lunchtime, or as Newt likes to think of it, midnight snack.) The jewel-like, surreal colours of night have washed away, and morning gold has paled, leaving the building cast in slick white and sterilized chrome. 

He fishes his ID out of his pocket and scans it at the entrance, nodding to Rhodes at the checkpoint as he passes. Pulling on his cap, he fiddles with his hair as he walks and tries to get it in some order where it won't accidentally blind him, but he's only partly successful.

Keeping his hands occupied under cover of that task, he takes in the layout of the people nearby, studies them quickly and from the corners of his eyes to see if what he’s waiting for has happened yet. The only other times he's come in this early it was for recon purposes, but if he's right about today, there’s no time left for that.

The scientists and doctors in their lab coats are as professionally hushed as usual, while the guards cluster like silent beetles at the entrances and exits, occasionally patrolling in pairs. WCKD staff movements are easy for him to read by now, and they remind him of clockwork, the clicking of their heels tapping like the second hand of an obsolete analogue watch. 

But like in a hive, when something new arrives to upset the environment, everyone reacts hurriedly and seizes around the problem, each in their own particular way. Their patterns change to accommodate whatever intrusion or disruption needs to be dealt with, and it could take a few hours before they fall back into their routines. 

If today's the day the train arrives, that’ll definitely disrupt their patterns. 

There are some warning signs that something's up if you know where to spot them, which Newt thankfully does. It raises his interest immediately when he sees a tech or two called away from their monitors, their visible surprise at that. He takes in the pensive preparedness on the faces of officers and any other officials with Need-to-Know privileges, and it all bodes well to him. Newt passes on by but he takes note of these tiny indicators as he makes his way up to the twentieth floor.

Watching the people below shrink to miniature from inside the elevator as it rises, the air in the city feels pressure-sensitive to him today, like they're inside a shaken bottle. No one knows exactly when the cap will burst off, jettisoning all their carefully cultivated order into the air to be consumed by the heat of the sun. One careless twist, a flick of the cosmic wrist, and this place, the last vestige of civilization possibly on the whole continent, if not the world, will be laid bare on the sand and left to evaporate, or be overrun by Cranks just like everywhere else. 

Or maybe this is just Newt, projecting. This is sleep deprivation and anxiety chattering at him. Stress making him jittery and even more bitter and dramatic than usual. (He has to keep it in check or he'll be sent back to the psychs again, and he won't be any good to anyone from a hospital room, so.)

But the ride up is too long for his mind not to wander a little.

There's an idea he'd been fixated on when he was younger and had a lot more time to think about these things, and the idea is this: that in another world, he's probably out there, somewhere. 

He's also probably dead. Not to be too negative, obviously. But odds seem good to him that in a lot of parallel universes, the ones that are close enough to resemble his own that they really matter to him, he's been torn apart by Cranks, or he's dead from whatever the hell they do to people in the Mazes, or his bones are being picked clean by vultures out in the Scorch. Or maybe he's succumbed to the Flare already, unprotected by WCKD's walls and guns and extreme precautions. 

Maybe he never even made it out of that snow-covered basement at all, and he's entombed there, with his parents. 

He thinks it's more than likely that in most other worlds, if he exists at all, he never got this far. 

Not that he dwells on it much anymore, that'd be dangerous; but he thinks it's simply realistic. The steps it took to end up where he is now were dictated by chance and luck and maybe a curse or two thrown at him by the universe. His existence is a series of near-misses and defied odds. 

(He imagines Tommy would mutter something about him misinterpreting the concept of infinite worlds, and yeah, he's missed being bitten by the quantum physics bug and never fully understood it. But then, Newt was never an Elite, even when he was still in the program alongside them.)

And now, as he finally exits the elevator he has to keep his pace from quickening at the thought that maybe, just maybe, he'll pull it off one more time. That unlikely tendency to survive will make itself apparent in him. Today he'll be able to make it all worth it. 

The train is supposedly arriving today, he’s guessed as much from the chatter of secretly hacked coms and surreptitious scanning of documents above his security clearance. The most valuable cargo they have is being brought to their most protected shelter. 

Headed to HQ is a train carrying immunes. More specifically, the ones who were with the Right Arm.

His sister might be with them. If she's alive, there's a chance (however slim) that she's in that group. And if she's not alive... Well, even if that's the case, he'll still be the closest he's ever come to freeing all of them, something he's been planning since he was disqualified from participating in the Maze Trials as a kid.

He's planning on being a statistical outlier. Banking on it. Fuck the multiverse, and quantum physics, and fuck WCKD. 

He fixes a muted smile to his face as he enters ops, and he waits for the news of the train's arrival to come through official channels. 


	2. Arrival

All it really took was Aris mouthing off at one guard and attempting to throw a punch, and Minho decided he would kill for that kid. 

He'd liked him well enough before, because he'd saved them all from being strung up and drained for their various special juices (gag), but that was the moment when Minho really appreciated him, personally.

He builds trust fast, it's true. Sometimes it's out of necessity, like it was back with his Runners in the Maze, and sometimes it's hearing a tiny toothpick shank, who seemed up to that point to be generally quiet and passive, call someone three times his body mass ‘five thousand kinds of ugly motherfucker’ out of pure spite. 

Either way. 

For Minho, once that bond's forged it's nearly impossible to break. And it adds to the fury that burns in his chest remembering the guards choosing that as an excuse to kick the crap out of him. Minho stepping up to help Aris out had resulted in them being put into different cars of the train, which was more of a punishment than they probably realized. After months with Aris and Sonya as the only familiar faces to him—even if they were kept separate for most of that time—they’re basically family.

So when something strange happens their third day on the train, and afterward he can’t find them, he doesn't know if he's more worried about Aris and Sonya, or pissed off that he actually thought he was going to be free for a minute there. 

He'd been loaded on with dozens of other immunes. He didn't know the names of anyone in his car, though he thinks there might be a few from the Right Arm, like him. When they'd arrived in the mountains and Thomas turned things upside-down—the way he apparently does when he arrives anywhere, it seems—so many people had wanted to hear their story, to hear about Mary's famous ‘source on the inside’, Minho hadn't really had time to catch very many names or faces. They'd all been a blur, except for a couple like Harriet and Sonya.

Sonya and Aris weren't there then, they were boxed into another compartment. After countless hours in the train car, his bones vibrated at the same frequency as the wheels against the tracks, the hum moving through him until it'd been a constant, inescapable, incessant—

—then a sound had jolted him back to wakefulness. Outside, to the right, maybe—it sounded like an engine, roar swelling and receding and then growing louder once more, as though there was a vehicle beside the train. He held his breath. There was a thump a few minutes after that, and Minho's head jerked around to try and pinpoint where it’d come from, and he caught the echo of a crash towards the back of the train.

Something in his gut told him that it was Thomas.

Or at the very least, a Thomas-like person. He wasn't the only one like _that,_ in existence. Brenda came to mind, walking brazenly through a snapping, clamouring huddle of chained-up Cranks. Those people who grabbed shotguns and cocked them effortlessly, the ones who popped up in boxes in fields and ran into death traps like it was second nature to them. The ones that gathered people up and got them moving, and then held them together through all sorts of mayhem and catastrophe. There had to be people like that all through history, humanity would've collapsed a long time ago without them. 

(Minho had always hoped _he_ was one of them, at least to the others. He'd wanted to be. He'd tried.)

He'd imagined describing all of this from his perspective to Fry, after they’d finished up rescuing him in some dramatic, completely un-fucking-believable manner. _'It was when things started breaking and exploding, that I knew. I knew it was you shanks.'_

He'd maybe get a little teary-eyed. But hey, why not? It'd been one hell of a trip.

But in the moment, when his mouth grew dry, his mind was too preoccupied to really construct much more of it than that. He gripped the bar that he was chained to and waited, strained and then exhaling when he heard the thud of boots on the roof. Yeah, he thought, no one else would run across the roof of a moving train. Those were definitely his people, being batshit crazy up there. His heart felt like it might give out, as he thought to himself, _finally._

It being a Thomas-style rescue, he shouldn’t have been surprised at all when a gut-clenching explosion up front somewhere shook the entire train, startling cries from all of the chained children around him, and everything hurtled to an unceremonious stop. Minho had braced himself, so he was a little luckier than they were. He’d thought of reassuring the others, but without knowing what would happen next, it felt like that'd be a bit premature. He wasn’t in the mood to give any of them false hope. For all he knew, the next explosion would incinerate them all, there was always that chance.

As it turned out, the rest of it—someone banging on one of the compartments, the sounds of gunfire, and of a berg outside first firing, then returning—whatever had happened out there, it didn't end up being his ticket out of there.

And when he saw the Rat Man's face contort, the gleeful vindictive fire in his eyes as he looked at Minho and sneered 'he didn't get what he really wanted,' like Minho was clearly destined to be used as some kind of bait (because his friend's a predictable, lion-hearted idiot who would definitely fall for it), that's when Minho should've stopped imagining what he'd say to Fry. He should've stopped expecting to escape at all, at that point.

But he still hasn't.

Instead, as they get the trains underway again and reload the immunes, Minho scans the crowd for the flash of Sonya's bright hair, for Aris's bruised face. And when he doesn't see them anywhere, and instead takes in the missing train car up ahead of his own... he knows that his chances at getting out of here just went up, exponentially. Even if he’s furious that it should’ve worked (and if he hadn’t been separated from the others, it would’ve) he knows that his friends haven’t given up. They’ll try again.

He doesn't see where this building is. When the train arrives and they're loaded onto a berg, they move from one loading dock to another, and then up into an elevator that rises for a disconcertingly long period of time before stopping. Minho finds himself kept apart from the other immunes, then. Even gets his own special room all to himself. This has to be at the Rat Man's request, probably. He wonders if Janson's sleeping one room over with a cartoonishly big button that'll trigger a net to drop over Thomas when they come in.

They take off the chains, though, and it's the smallest possible mercy but it's more than he's had in some time. It's also a little worrying. As he's pushed into the room with its empty bunks, he realizes they must feel secure enough that they don't think he needs to be locked up down here.

He'll make that their biggest mistake, he thinks, flexing his hands and rubbing at his wrists as he sits on the edge of one of the lower cots.

He really does hate WCKD. Not just Ava Paige, not just Janson. The organization as a whole, and everyone who works for them in any capacity. And the fact that they have him locked in their walls again, after everything, fuels him even more. If he could summon his rage into existence, it'd make solar flares look like candles on a goddamn birthday cake.

Inspecting the room doesn't yield anything useful or surprising. No handy vents under the beds, nothing but smooth concrete and chilly plastic mattresses. The blankets on his bunk are thin and scratchy, the pillow a floppy flat square. He lays down, a strange pang in his chest when he realizes, he's missing his hammock. Hell, he'll take sleeping on rocks in the Scorch over this fake comfort.

It's then, when he's almost going to sleep, that he feels the prickling of someone's eyes on him. And he notices there's a guard. Right outside his door, staring in through the small rectangular window. His face is uncovered, he’s not in one of the creepy masks Minho’s seen them wearing before. He’s not doing anything. Just gazing directly at him, like he's some sort of strange, caged animal. 

As he turns over, facing away and determined that he's going to ignore it, Minho considers that might be accurate. He does sort of feel like an animal, all teeth and claws and a hunger to be wild. It's not so strange. 

But gawking at him is pretty fucking rude, however you slice it.

He checks over his shoulder. The guard's still looking, dark eyes unblinking, and he looks like he's trying to... communicate, maybe? Say something, without speaking? Who knows.

Minho realizes he's never seen anyone working for WCKD that looked quite so _young_. If he had to guess, he'd say he's about Minho's age, maybe even younger.

He meets the unsettling stare with a challenging one of his own. If this kid has something to say, he should just open the door and _talk,_ you know, like a normal human being. Preferably leaving a nice big gap when he does, so Minho can force his way out of the cell. 

But after a minute, something passes behind his eyes, and Minho thinks he looks... _unspeakably_ sad. And then he finally looks away, redirecting his gaze forward, like he's conscious of displaying an actual emotion and that's probably against the official WCKD goon handbook, or whatever pamphlet they gave him when they talked him into saving the world through pseudo-scientific experimentation and the routine torture of children.

Minho scowls and flips back over, and glares at the wall like if he directs his hate towards it hard enough, it'll fracture and collapse into a convenient exit tunnel for him.

It's never occurred to him, though, that WCKD might use kids for something other than the Maze. He knows they’re scum, but he didn't think they'd stoop quite that low for some reason. Considering it now, he doesn't know why he thought that. Why he'd given them the benefit of the doubt that they wouldn't order children to fire launchers for them. 

The young guard's face, the sorrow and sympathy that had seemed so much more human than anything he’s seen from someone working for WCKD, sears itself into his brain as he falls asleep, along with the realization that it does so little to actually comfort him at all.


End file.
